News & Computer Go

The winner of this year's Acornsoft computer tournament will
apparently be marketed soon, and a similar tournament is to be held next
summer, but in the meantime another commercial programme has appeared
which, from what we have seen of it, seems to be quite a bit stronger
than any of the contenders in the tournament.

It is called Microgo1, and is produced by Allan Scarff. Available
now for the Electron and BBC micros, he hopes to have Commodore and
Spectrum versions available shortly. The programme uses some high level
artificial intelligence concepts, and hardly uses tree searches or
lookahead methods at all, but it plays go which looks remarkably like
that played by a human of around 15kyu.

Allan is an ambitious man, and if a quarter of his plans for selling
this programme are realised we should expect a doubling of the British
Go playing population within a year. (BGJ listed a sales
address.) For those who want to see it in action first we
present here a game in which it takes four stones from a 3 kyu. (It only
plays on a 9*9 board.)